Pokémon GO and Ingress developer Niantic has unveiled Campfire, the firm’s upcoming social app “for the real-world metaverse”, and its Lightship visual positioning system (VPS) to support greater world-mapping for developers.
Niantic described Campfire as “the ‘homepage’ of the real-world metaverse – a place where players can discover other players in their local area, message one another and share content, [and] organise their own events and meetups”.
Campfire is currently available for Ingress players, and will be accessible across all Niantic titles in the future.
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Lightship VPS required the creation of a new real-world map specifically for AR, using data from existing Niantic players, developers, and surveyors – with over 17 million points of interest submitted from the firm’s combined Ingress and Pokémon GO.
Once a location has been “sufficiently scanned”, it will be activated on the VPS and made available for developers, who can create 10 metre-radius experiences within VPS-supported locations. VPS is currently available in 30,000 locations within San Francisco, Los Angeles Seattle, and New York in the US, London, UK, and Tokyo, Japan.